


On the Selection of Those Who Will Represent Humanity to the Inhabitants of Toliman B

by Syme



Category: Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream - James Alan Gardner
Genre: Future, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syme/pseuds/Syme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A record of the sub-committee's interview of Maggie Farrell, Somnotician and candidate for the position of artist on the delegation which will shortly leave Earth to make first contact with the inhabitants of Toliman B.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Selection of Those Who Will Represent Humanity to the Inhabitants of Toliman B

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophia_sol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophia_sol/gifts).



> Thank you for the great prompts, sophia_sol! I was so pleased to see someone else loved this story as much as I did.

The next candidate was brought into the room. As they all had, she looked immediately for the hidden cameras. Unlike the others, she didn’t bother to hide that she was looking.

“She’s pretty,” said Todd.

“Shut up, Todd,” said Portia, joining in the chorus.

She was pretty. Her curly black hair framed an arrestingly beautiful face, and she was dressed stylishly, in a long moss-green coat. More importantly, she had an air of confidence that gave grace to her movements.

People never looked like they really were. Portia reshuffled the papers in front of her.

The aide gestured to the chair in the middle of the featureless room. The candidate sat, and the aide slipped out. When he closed the door behind him there was no sign of its opening in the crystalline wall. The room was like the inside of a prism.

Kevin looked down the conference table at the others--Todd, Portia, and Harriet-- then back at the hologram, where the image of the candidate glanced curiously around her.

“Maggie Farrell,” he said, pressing the button to turn on his microphone. “Congratulations on making it this far.”

“Thank you,” said the candidate. Maggie.

“We’ve read your application, of course, and we’ve done extensive background research.”

Maggie nodded.

“But now we’d like to hear you introduce yourself. As you would introduce yourself to the Tolimen, assuming of course that communication has been established and so forth.”

It was a softball question to start, but Maggie appeared to be thinking about it seriously. “I would tell them that I’m an artist,” she said. “I think that, if they’re intelligent, they must have something like art. We can get into the details later.”

“Let’s get into them now,” said Harriet, pressing her button. “You are a Somnotician, correct?”

“Correct,” said Maggie. She smiled, quickly, for the first time. The quick flash of her smile was beautiful, which only confirmed Portia’s opinion of her. She seemed lovely and harmless, but her “art” told another story.

Maggie was explaining the process of making dream-visions. The bare bones were done on a computer, in VR, but once the drug cocktail was established, the Somnoticians entered their own dreams and manipulated the surroundings from within. “I do most of my work that way,” said Maggie. “I dress the sets, write most of the dialogue, sometimes even change the storyline. I always want to make sure the dream is tailored to the experience of the dreamers. Most of my best work was done primarily from within the dream-- _Anna_ , _The Station at Night_ , _A Snake in the Grass_ \--“

Portia pressed her button hastily, before Maggie could get to her more famous works. “Let’s talk about _Snake in the Grass_ ,” she said.

Maggie blinked, thrown off stride, but recovered quickly. “Sure,” she said. “ _A Snake in the Grass_ was the dream that made my name. It’s a little less subtle than I might go for today, but I still have a lot of fondness for it.”

“It’s a religious dream, correct?” asked Portia. Her voice came out stern, rather than shaky.

“It’s a retelling of the Garden of Eden story,” said Maggie. “The dreamer plays as Adam-- he’s barely mentioned in the original Bible story, but I thought his role was interesting, as the only one who has no direct contact with the serpent.”

“Satan.”

“That’s never directly stated-- in the Bible, or in my dream.”

“But in your dream, Adam does meet Satan, right?”

Kevin and Harriet were starting to give Portia some curious looks. Portia wasn’t sure if they had even heard of _Snake in the Grass_ before. They weren’t exactly connoisseurs of pop culture. Todd was reading something on his phone, lost to the world.

“In my dream, the serpent approaches Adam first, and Adam refuses. He chooses not to have knowledge of good and evil.”

“The serpent is depicted fairly unusually in your dream, isn’t it?”

Maggie shrugged. “Well, no one really know what snakes looked like.”

It was true. None of them had ever seen a snake.

“There are some pictures,” said Portia.

“Not many,” said Maggie. “And they’re difficult to find. I wanted my serpent to look like the idea of a snake in people’s imaginations. Terrifying, but also subtle. Able to persuade. Able to insinuate itself into small spaces. Even into your mind.”

Even into your blood. And that was the problem with the dream. “Your serpent shows Adam visions of the future,” Portia prompted.

“He sees visions, but the source is unclear,” Maggie said carefully. “Specifically, he sees the Poison Wars.”

“That’s a controversial choice of visions,” said Kevin, with good humour. “What made you choose it?”

"Several reasons: First, it was recent-- still in living memory for some, at the time I made the dream. Second, it embodies the worst results of knowledge. That people used our knowledge of the human body to make poisons like Grant’s Cure, and that we used our knowledge of society to deliver them secretly-- it makes the strongest possible argument against knowledge. Third-- well. It was the last time people had snakes in their blood.”

Not the last time, Portia knew. “Those people,” she said, “The SA-positive, they aren’t exactly portrayed sympathetically, are they?”

Maggie’s gaze scanned the room, looking again for Portia and the others. “I don’t think the mass slaughter of the Redeemed made them very sympathetic, no,” she said.

“The Redeemed weren’t the only ones who died,” said Portia.

Maggie looked left, then right. “What--“

“Is your dream anti-Papist?”

“No. It’s an exploration of--“

“But it is religious, as you said earlier. It has a religious message?”

“It is religious,” Maggie said. She looked directly in front of her, staring, from Portia’s perspective, at Harriet’s left ear. “The message comes from the dreamer, not from me.”

“And you _are_ religious. Redeemed, in fact.”

“OK,” Kevin interrupted, cutting the microphones, and turning off the hologram of Maggie. “That’s enough.” He turned to face the rest of the conference table. “Portia, what’s up? Why are you asking all these questions about religion?”

Portia forced herself to take a deep breath before responding. She was shaking, but she was able to seem reasonably calm. “If she’s a religious bigot, we need to know,” she said. “Is she going to try to bring her religion to the Tolimen? Will she try to convert them?”

“We don’t have many religious people so far, though,” said Harriet. “It might be good to have a few, right? Don’t we want the ship to be a microcosm of human beliefs?”

“ _No_ ,” Portia said firmly. She couldn’t think of anything she wanted less. The ship should be the best of humanity, untainted by hatred or bias, free from the unthinking religious passion that had brought about the Poison Wars.

“I don’t think we’re on the same page here,” said Harriet.

“How bad is that dream?” Kevin asked.

“It’s bad,” Portia said. She had only watched it once, and not at a good time, but her memories of that nightmare were clear. She thought.

“Then we’ll all watch it,” Kevin said decisively. “All right, guys? Everyone watch _The Grass Snake_ tonight, and we can address it in tomorrow’s questioning. For now, let’s get on to her language skills.”

Kevin waited for nods, then turned the microphones back on.

 

 

The afternoon passed without any more questions from Portia. She learned that Maggie spoke eight languages fluently, had stunning scores on the psychological testing, was a certified EMT, and was licensed to fly an airplane. All the candidates who had made it so far had comparable skills, though, and only a very few of them would be chosen to be on the ship that would leave for Toliman B in a year.

Maggie would not be one of them, Portia was determined. A majority vote was enough to pass a candidate on to the next level, but that meant Portia only needed to persuade one of the other three. She was sure she could do it.

Still, she was troubled. That night, for the first time in years, she dreamed of Agnes.

For most of the time Portia knew Agnes, their friendship was only online. They took some of the same High School classes, but soon moved on to messaging, and later video chatting, about every subject under the sun. Portia told Agnes things she had never told anyone before or since. She felt perfectly comfortable with Agnes, almost as though she was talking to another part of herself.

Portia loved Agnes intensely, and she loved all the talks they had. But most of all, she loved the arguments they had about religion. Agnes’ family was Papist, in the half-hearted way that some people were Papist in the years after Grant’s Cure had done away with the snakes in their blood. Portia’s family was similarly half-heartedly Redeemed. But Portia herself was a zealot-- so strongly in love with God’s purity that she saw Her everywhere. In the sky, in the trees, in the faces of her friends and family. In Agnes.

Portia’s earnest religiosity annoyed everyone around her, but Agnes never lost patience with her. Agnes was as passionate as Portia was about her own beliefs. They argued for hours, about scripture, about ethics, about history.

Eventually, they enjoyed their arguments too much to keep them online. Portia talked Agnes, who rarely went out, into meeting for lunch. They met four times, before the last time. They had the same salad, the same sandwich, the same coffee. But only a few hours later, Agnes was dead.

That was how Portia found out that the Poison Wars weren’t really over. Not everyone had taken Grant’s Cure, and not all the poisons were aimed at the Redeemed.

When Portia heard the news, she cried for Agnes but also, shamefully, for herself. She had lost her faith, the faith in God’s ability to make everything pure and good, and she knew she would never get it back. Religious passion, religious faith, had killed Agnes, and Portia would never again allow herself to be like the people that had murdered her friend.

The dreams she sometimes had of Agnes had no content. No narrative. Agnes looked at her, still seventeen, still smiling, but never spoke.

 

 

“You have a point,” Kevin said. “That dream-vision was definitely ... controversial.”

It was the next morning, and they sat comfortably around the conference table with their tablets and microphones in front of them. Harriet was eating a muffin. Todd looked hung-over.

“It wasn’t so bad,” said Harriet.

“Did you see how she showed the Papists? They had _actual_ snakes wrapped around them, in their mouths--“

“When were there snakes in their mouths? I don’t remember that part.”

“It was short. Whatever. The point is, it was definitely an anti-Papist screed. Portia’s right. We don’t want someone on the ship who’s religious enough to care about blood differences. What if the Tolimen have snakes in their blood?”

“There’s no way they even have blood in the same way humans do,” muttered Todd. He was the only one on the committee with a background in science.

“But a lot of people _do_ care about that,” said Harriet. “We want to show ourselves to the Tolimen as we really are.”

“No we don’t, Harriet,” Portia said impatiently. “Where are you getting this from? We want the crew to be the best selection.”

“Let’s table this discussion,” Kevin said. “We can talk more about religion in today’s questioning, after we deal with the equipment issue.”

He pressed a series of buttons, and the hologram of Maggie appeared again. This time she was already seated, wearing the same green coat, and scanning the walls again.

She turned abruptly when Kevin said good morning, as though looking for the microphone. But she would never find that either. The sound was purposefully dispersed throughout the room, as though it came from every direction in turn. The candidates were meant to be unsettled by the room, as they would be unsettled by the long journey through space. As they would be unsettled by the first contact with the aliens.

 

Kevin and the others spent the morning quizzing Maggie on the technical details of her dream-visions, while Portia watched in silence. Maggie spoke about her work with obvious passion, even when going over the mundane details of wires and chemicals.

What else did she have passion for? For her religion? Was she a zealot, as Portia had once been?

How could Harriet think that they could have just a _little_ zealotry on the ship, just a _sample_ of the fanaticism that had killed so many? Harriet was an innocent, but Portia knew better. Zealotry polluted. Send one fanatic, one person who believed as Portia once had, and Toliman would end up as mired in wars and poisonings as Earth had.

The ship’s crew had to be pure. They had to be untainted by the worst of humanity.

Portia rubbed her eyes. Her thoughts were unsettling her. The dream of Agnes had made her feel off-balance all day.

Kevin had finally moved to the most important topic. Maggie was explaining her use of symbols, explaining why the Papists appeared with snakes wrapped around them, snakes in their eyes, snakes in their mouths. It was all nonsense.

When Maggie stopped talking, Portia pressed her button. “Yesterday, you said your dream was religious, right?”

Maggie nodded slowly. The committee’s voices were digitally altered to sound like one questioner, but Portia had noticed that Maggie seemed to be catching on to the differences between them. She was certain, at any rate, that Maggie recognized her from the day before. Probably thought of her as the one who was obsessed with religion, which wasn’t far from the truth.

Portia rubbed her eyes again. She didn’t like the direction of her thoughts this morning. The way Maggie made her think. “And you yourself are Redeemed,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Your family is Redeemed.”

“Some are,” Maggie said easily. Portia was surprised-- even today, when there were no physical differences, mixing between religions was rare.

“So,” she said, continuing as though there had been no interruption, “your dream is for the Redeemed.”

“I am Redeemed,” said Maggie. “I can’t make a dream that doesn’t ultimately express my own beliefs about the world. So in that sense, yes.”

“And it’s for the SA-negative.”

“Almost everyone is SA-negative.”

Not everyone. Not everyone. “Your dream is only for people who are like you,” Portia said. “It makes monsters of those who believe differently.”

Maggie stood, the hologram growing taller. She was eye-level with Portia now. She looked up and down the walls again. When she paused, by some fluke chance, she appeared to look out of the hologram and directly into Portia’s eyes. “No,” she said. “You’ve got it completely wrong. My dream makes monsters out of my own heart.”

 

All through the rest of the questioning, Portia turned Maggie’s answer over in her mind. She had no idea what it had meant. She felt unsettled, confused, in need of sleep.

But that night, instead of sleeping, Portia hooked herself up and dreamed Maggie’s dream.

She dreamed of the green grass fields of the Garden of Eden, that seemed to stretch on unchangingly forever. She dreamed of the ripple of the snake in the grass, barely visible, but making the entire landscape sinister by its presence. She dreamed of the insinuating whisper of the snake’s voice, showing her the people after the fall. The flashes of gold in their eyes, bulges flickering through their veins, fangs glittering in their mouths, so quickly glimpsed you could almost think it was your imagination.

She dreamed that she refused to eat, turned away, but the snake twisted with her, still whispering. It showed her the poisons of the future, poisons that slithered into the blood and stopped the heart in an instant. It showed her the images of the dead and among them, for an instant, she saw Agnes’s face.

“Why would this persuade me?” Portia as Adam asked. The snake had led her to the tree at the center of the garden, but she refused to look at it, turned away towards the grass.

“Because I will be with you either way,” whispered the snake. “If you don’t see me, I will be with you. If I am gone, I will be with you.”

And then it was gone, the only sign of its presence a flicker in the grass.

 

When she woke up, Portia felt as though she hadn’t slept at all. She stared mindlessly out the window as her car drove her to work, seeing images from the dream pass in front of her. In some respects it was precisely detailed, down to each blade of grass, but in others it was as slippery and forgettable as an ordinary dream. Portia had never experienced a manufactured dream-vision so powerfully. There was no question of Maggie’s artistry.

But the images of the Papists were as bad as she remembered. They did appear as monsters, whatever Maggie had said. And Maggie’s faith, Maggie’s zealotry, was evident in every part of the dream.

 

“I’m going to have to vote nay,” said Kevin. They voted in a circle around the conference table, with no secrecy, to encourage discussion. “Portia had a point that she does have some unfortunate religious views. In addition, I thought she appeared too nervous during the questioning. Harriet?”

“I vote aye,” said Harriet. “I want to have some diversity of viewpoints on the crew, and frankly we don’t have another very good artistic candidate. Todd, what do you say?”

“Aye,” said Todd. “Her test scores were high. Portia, you’re a nay, right?”

“Yes,” said Portia. “Nay.”

How could it be anything else? She couldn’t let herself be persuaded by Maggie’s talent, by her curiosity and intelligence. Maggie was the poison. Maggie’s fanatical beliefs would taint the crew. Maggie, the snake in the grass. The snake in the garden. The snake in the blood--

Oh. Oh, God. “Wait,” Portia said.

The others turned towards her, but Portia closed her eyes. She needed a moment, at least one moment, to realize what she had seen in herself. That she hadn’t changed completely, as she’d believed she had, from the teenager who was so fervently Redeemed that she saw God’s purity in everything.

There could be no crew untainted by the evils of humanity, because the crew would be full of humans. Full of snakes.

“I change my vote,” Portia said. She didn’t wait for the others’ surprise. “Aye. I can’t think of anyone better.”

 


End file.
